ALEXANDER FLEMING 1881-1955

Alexander Fleming came from a Scottish fam­ily of farmers. He was born in August 1881, at Lochfield, the youngest of eight children.

He did research work at St Mary’s Hospital under Sir Almroth Wright*, pioneer of vac­cine therapy, and became interested in bac­terial action and antibacterial drugs.

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*Wright, Almroth Edward (1861-1947) — English bacteriolo­gist who developed a vaccine against typhoid fever.

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After military service, during which he was able to make further studies of the problems of infection and use of antiseptics, Fleming returned to laboratory work. He was interested in antibacterial substances, which would be nontoxic to animal tissues. The first fruit of his search was the discovery of the lisozyme. His epochal discovery in 1928, of the antibacterial powers of the mould from which penicillin is derived, was a great triumph. He found that a liquid mould culture, which he named penicillin, prevented growth of staphylococci.

Fleming began to go to school when he was five. He was a strong little boy. His lessons came easily to him, he had a splendid mem­ory and was very intelligent. In the country school he had the only teacher who taught reading, history, geography and arithmetic.

Later on, when his father died, Alec went to the school at Darvel, the nearest town, which lay four miles from the farm at Lochfield. Alec had to walk early each morn­ing and home again in the evening.

When he was 14, Alec left home and went to live in London with his brother. Alec did not want to leave his happy country life, he would have liked to make farming his career. But his mother decided to send him to the Poly­technic School in London. He was soon work­ing in a class of boys far older than himself.

As the Boer War1 had then broken out, he decided to join the London Scottish, the regiment, which many young Scots joined when they went to work in London.

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*Boer War— the second of the South African Wars, 1899— 1902, waged between Dutch settlers in South Africa and the British.

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Flem­ing also shot, swam and played water polo for the regiment. But he was never sent with the regiment to South Africa.

When Alec was 20, an old uncle, a farmer, died and left him some money. So Alec de­cided to become a doctor. He and his broth­er discussed where he should do his medical training.

Fleming had to pass an examination before he could be allowed to enter a school of medicine. He took a few lessons and then sat for the exam. He passed on top, and became one of the most brilliant students the hospital had ever had. He worked very hard — every morning he got up at 5 o’clock to study while the rest of the students were still asleep.

Fleming arrived at St Mary’s Hospital quite by chance, and it was quite by chance that he came into contact with the man who was to affect his whole life — Sir Almroth Wright, a famous bacteriologist.

Among Wright’s disciples there was a charm­ing young doctor called Freeman. He was a good shot and he wanted to build up a new team. He decided to persuade Fleming to join Wright’s inoculation service. But as soon as Alec had his diploma, Freeman invited him to come and work for Wright. Fleming agreed and joined Wright’s research team in the laboratory on 6th August 1906. He never left the laboratory since his death.

Wright’s inoculation service was located in two small rooms at St Mary’s Hospital. Wright had been Professor of Pathology. Wright was doing experiments, which were inspired by the great work of the French chemist Louis Pasteur — whom Fleming regarded as the ideal of what a scientist should be — and of the English surgeon Joseph Lister. Pasteur had established that many diseases are caused by invisible mi­crobes, or germs. These germs attack peo­ple through the mouth or nose, or else by setting in open wounds.

Wright’s idea was that the only way to cure bacterial infection, therefore, was to dis­cover some means of killing the microbes but without killing the white corpuscles at the same time — sometimes that would help the white corpuscles in their struggle against the invading germs. It was this idea of Wright’s, which was the basis of all Flem­ing’s work. He believed in the great force of the human body when faced with disease caused by bacteria. He decided to work on this problem the rest of his life.

Fleming sometimes worked 16 or 20 hours a day. He would not leave the laboratory until very late at night.

At the very beginning of the war Wright was asked to open a research laboratory in France. He took with him some of his best men from St Mary’s and invited Fleming to assist him to his important work. Fleming agreed enthusiastically.

The first laboratory consisted of two bath­rooms through which a drain-pipe ran, so that the whole place stank. Every morn­ing, on their way to the laboratory, Wright and his assistant had to go through the wards, where they could see the terrible effects of explosives and the infection set up in open wounds by earth and pieces of clothing. The patients got worse and worse until they died of blood poisoning, espe­cially from gas gangrene. The doctors were powerless to help them.

Having examined the pieces of cloth from different parts of the dead from gas gan­grene soldiers’ uniforms Fleming looked for germs in these pieces of cloth and then he identified the germs which had been car­ried deep into the soldiers’ wounds.

Fleming had found, too, that the battle against infection could be won partly by the body itself if it were not hindered by violet antiseptics, so dangerous to the tissues, or if it were not hindered by bandages that kept air away from the tissues, which were then unable to do their work, namely, to fight the germs. Unfortunately, the anti­septics were then the only defence against microbes. Fleming was working day and night and his only wish was to do every­thing he could to help the unhappy man. The war ended in November 1918. In Janu­ary, Fleming was demobilized and returned to St.Mary’s.

One day Fleming’s assistant brought him a plate on which a colony of dangerous bac­teria were being grown. The plate was spoiled. Some mould had accidentally formed on it and the assistant was going to throw it away. Fleming looked at the plate. He had a wonderful power of observation. He paid attention that the germs all round the mould were gone. Fleming recognized the importance of what had happened and immediately set about studying it.

He put some of the mould on other plates and grew more colonies of it. Now came the most important test of all. Fleming inject­ed a rabbit and a mouse with this substance. It did them no harm.

The doctor named this substance penicillin. It belongs to the same family of moulds that often appear on dry bread, in damp cup­boards or on old shoes, or fruit. In a few days it turns dark green and secretes drops of yellow liquid. This liquid stops the growth of the most common disease germs.

Fleming was finding out more and more about penicillin. He found that the mould began to produce penicillin to 20 drops of distilled water would keep microbes. On the sixth day the penicillin had doubled its strength. On the seventh day it was 10 times as strong. On the eighth day it was 20 times as strong. After this it grew weaker and weaker.

He tried the new penicillin in the hospital with good results. But the penicillin was seldom at its strongest when it was wanted. Fleming couldn’t help thinking that one day his child, penicillin, would do better than anything found so far. He was still looking for a chemist.

On 3rd September 1939, Great Britain was at war with Germany again. Fleming lived in London. One night a bomb exploded nearly and Fleming suddenly saw door and win­dows advancing towards him. The Flemings had to move out of London, but Fleming often slept at the hospital. Meanwhile, at Oxford two great research workers, Florey and Chain* had found a new method for ex­tracting pure penicillin.

*Chain, Ernst Boris (1906-1979) — German born British bio­chemist. After the discovery of penicillin by Fleming Chain worked to isolate and purify it. For this work, he shared the 1945 Nobel Prize for Medicine with Fleming and Florey.

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They tried their new powder on different bacteria. 50 white mice were given a fatal dose of deadly microbes. 25 of these mice were treated with penicillin. After 16 hours all the mice, who had not been treat­ed with penicillin were dead. Of the mice which had been injected with penicillin, all survived. It was the happiest day of Fleming’s life.

Penicillin had not yet been used on man. Then one day a case was tried. A policeman was suffering from an infected wound. His whole body was covered with abscesses. There was only a little pure penicillin. The dying man was given the first injection of penicillin. At the end of 24 hours there was a great improvement in his condition. But Florey and Chain were short of penicillin and the policeman died.

Florey was looking for a way to put peni­cillin into production. He went off to Amer­ica with some penicillin mould. The U.S. government offered to give several million dollars for large-scale production of peni­cillin.

Three years later, 21 American companies were producing enough penicillin to treat seven million patients.

In 1942, Fleming tried his own first exper­iment. A friend of his was very ill, dying. After several injections the man was cured.

The war ended and Fleming went on a tri­umphal tour of the U.S. The French gov­ernment invited him to France. A little later, in Belgium, he received three honorary doctorates in two days.

A telegram from Stockholm, told him that he had been given the Nobel Prize for Med­icine (together with Florey and Chain). He flew over to Sweden to receive his prize. The prizes were presented by the King of Sweden. In his Nobel Prize lecture, Flem­ing said, “My only merit is that I did not neglect on observation, and that I pursued the subject as a bacteriologist”. Fame and success left Fleming quite unmoved.

He died on the 11th March 1955 in London and was buried in St Paul’s Cathedral. He is known as the “father of antibiotics”. The two letters “A.F.” on a flagstone show where he lies.

On October 10th, in 1957 a very simple mon­ument was unveiled at the entrance gate of Lochfield Farm, a tall block of red granite with the inscription: